The works we have reviewed are divided into five
groups:
Working as a translator
How to Succeed as a Freelance Translator
by Corinne McKay
I've been meaning to read this guide for a while
- ever since I came across a reference to it in
Corinne's translation blog, Thoughts on
Translation.
The book is intended as a guide for potential
translators and newcomers who would like to get a
potted overview of the translation industry, but it
also has some advice of interest to experienced
translators. A general work with a broad scope, it's
primarily aimed at readers based in the US and
provides information about setting up a business
there.
Corinne, who is American, outlines the types of
legal entities that translators' businesses generally
have in the USA and also goes into a bit of detail
about tax issues one needs to bear in mind as a
self-employed person. She also describes various
translators' associations like the ATA, which are
useful for networking with other linguists and
getting further professional training.
I think the author's done a good job of writing a
readable introduction to the industry, and she's
provided lots of useful pointers regarding training
institutions and day-to-day aspects of a translator's
work. The section on the financial side of running a
translation business is a particularly important one
with plenty of sound advice from someone with oodles
of experience.
I hope Corinne decides to update the book soon
and expand it in places as some parts seem a bit
outdated and/or underrepresented now (Dec. 2010),
like the section on CAT tools, which have developed a
lot over the last few years. Issues like (indemnity)
insurance also need handling. Although Web links do
get changed or abandoned after a while, I think a lot
more of these could be included, reflecting the many
valuable information sources now available on the
Net.
=== UPDATE ===
The second edition of Corinne's book is now
available at www.lulu.com. This is a revised and
expanded edition with a few brand new sections (e.g.
on using social networks). It's also more
international, with references to the situation for
translators/self-employed people in other countries,
which also makes it more applicable to many readers.
Definitely a "must have" in my opinion!
August 2011
Reference works
The Cambridge Guide to English Usage
by Pam Peters
This is a work you might want to refer to if
you're puzzled about English usage, grammar or
spelling. It's suitable for language learners and
anyone who uses the written language and cares about
the way they write, which means individuals, authors,
proof-readers, translators (and interpreters for that
matter), and students and teachers alike.
The book contains just over 600 pages, most of
which are used to discuss the entries; there are a
number of short appendices at the back of it that
briefly cover points such as the IPA (a phonetic
script used in many dictionaries), geological eras,
units of measurement, currencies, proof-reading marks
and letter layouts.
What you'll be able to find in this work is a
brief discussion of many language issues that might
well have bugged you at some point (or are currently
doing so). Do you write "online", "on-line" or "on
line", for example? Or "Motif" or "motive"? What's
the difference between "malevolent" and "malicious"
or "malignant" and "malign"? What about "intensive" v
"intense" - where's the difference? You'll find a
clear explanation here.
The book, which is almost a sort of thesaurus at
times, also goes into stylistic issues like the
differences between linguistic varieties such as
America, British, Canadian and Australian English. It
discusses the usage and frequency of expressions by
drawing on linguistic corpora collected specifically
for American, Australian and British databases used
for research and for writing dictionaries. These take
an objective "look" at language by recording words
and the way they're employed, i.e. in what situations
(formal/informal, etc.) and with what meaning.
This descriptive rather than prescriptive
approach is also adopted by the author, Pam Peters,
who was Director of the Dictionary Research Centre at
Macquarie University, Australia at the time (perhaps
she still is). So although she tells us what Fowler
and others have decried about the way words are used,
she doesn't do it herself (thank goodness!).
I recommend you to get a copy of this if you
constantly (or even just occasionally) need to look
things up that you find tricky or unusual in
English.
Monday, 15 Nov 2010
The Chicago Manual of Style
by University of Chicago Press Staff
Well, to be honest, this isn't really a book many
people would want to actually "read", even though it
is interesting. But it is certainly a useful
reference work if you need occasional guidance about
writing in or translating into American English.
It really is a beefy manual, too, as the edition
I have (the 15th, from 2003) is 950-odd pages long
and packed with information, explanations and
examples of good usage. It basically covers the
University of Chicago Press's "house style"
("consistent forms of capitalzation, punctuation,
spelling, hyphenation, documentation, and so forth",
it says in the preface), but it also deals with
grammar and how to write clearly and avoid common
mistakes in written English.
Believe it or not, the first edition of this book
was published in 1906, over a hundred years ago. The
editorial team now supplements the manual with an
interactive website via which users can ask questions
about writing in English. Why not pay it a
visit?
Incidentally, the 16th edition of the Manual
appeared in August 2010.
Oxford-Duden German Dictionary:
German-English / English-German
by O. Thyen, M. Clark, Werner
Scholze-Stubenrecht, J. B. Sykes
Hardback, 3rd edition, 2005. Comes with a CD-ROM
with words' pronunciation.
This is a big, weighty bilingual dictionary in
two sections, Ger-Eng and Eng-Ger, along with some
supplementary information about letter-writing,
writing a CV and using the phone, for example. Newer
versions have been published since I bought mine a
few years ago. The one I currently use is actually a
licensed online version offered by Kielikone, but
this printed hardback is still very helpful when I
work at home rather than in the office.
This book is an essential dictionary for
non-technical translation in view of the large number
of entries it contains (300,000 words and phrases, so
the cover says!) and the quality of the translations,
which is superb (and there are 500,000 of them in
all). It's a general work, so you'll need to use
specialist dictionaries as well if you're translating
something detailed from a specific field, although
plenty of technical terms are also included in it
along with familiar collocations and phrases.
I may be wrong, but I don't think there's a
CD-ROM version of this that can be used easily while
you translate, e.g. in conjunction with a CAT tool
(it would be great if there were...). The CD my
edition came with was a stand-alone effort that
included the pronunciation of words, but it wasn't
any help to me as a translator (it's OK for language
learners, I guess, although there are probably more
convenient and amusing ways of learning to pronounce
German words than this nowadays). Still, Oxford has
tried to add some extra value to the book, which is
generally a good idea, although the work is excellent
anyway.
What I like about it is not just its scope and
accurate translations, but it's page layout, which is
very user-friendly. The keywords are all in bold and
are navy blue, so they catch your eye right away, and
the makers have also added some "usage boxes"
explaining terms that need a longer definition, like
"Fachoberschule" and "Erziehungsgeld", rather than
attempting to fob you off with a one- or two-word
"equivalent" that isn't one. A good dictionary.
Friday, 25 March 2010
Fachwörterbuch Personalarbeit - Human
Resources Dictionary
by Hans-Otto Blaeser
I've been using this specialist
German-English/English-German dictionary quite
intensively for the last few months as I'm currently
translating a management training course. It's come
up with sound suggestions for just about all the
terms I've looked up in German, so I'd like to
recommend it to anyone else translating texts in this
field.
The book's certainly good value for money. (In
fact, at the time I bought it - in 2008 - the
publisher was even offering a year's free access to
its online database of HR terms as well.) The edition
I got was the fifth one, which had also been revised,
so it's obviously an ongoing project that has met
with a lot of interest among buyers.
The two sections are approx. 500 pages long, with
each page having two columns of entries and
translations. Apparently, there are 43,000 terms in
the book, which is quite something for a specialist
dictionary. Mind you, the author does cover a lot of
ground in it - labour law, the job market, social
insurance and accountancy issues, collective
bargaining, trade unions, personnel management,
recruitment, training and various other areas
concerned with HR.
Mr Blaeser (who seems to have a doctorate in Law
judging by the qualification mentioned in the
author's details at the very beginning) points out
expressions that are specific to German legislation.
He also uses a number of abbreviations to indicate
the specific area a term is used in as well as the
regional usage of a term (albeit limited to basic
spelling differences). Occasionally he's added some
brief notes to explain certain culture-specific
concepts (e.g. "Hauptschussabschluss" and
"Berufsgenossenschaft").
I'm glad to see he's also taken the trouble to
add a number of possible translations in some cases
rather than just one. At the end of the dictionary
you'll even find two comprehensive lists of
abbreviations and acronyms (Ger-Eng and Eng-Ger),
including abbreviations of the names of German laws.
So all in all, this book contains a lot of
information, making it a valuable aid to translators
and writers concerned with HRM.
Tuesday, 8 March 2010
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New Hart's Rules: The Handbook of Style for
Writers and Editors
by R. M. Ritter
This is one reference book that I wouldn't want
to be without - it's proved itself invaluable in my
work as a translator and proof-reader.
Despite its small size (it just about fits into a
jacket pocket), it contains a wealth of information
on many aspects of English usage (over 400 pages, in
fact, albeit in small print). Among other things, the
topics include preparing copy for publication,
spelling and hyphenation, punctuation,
capitalisation, quotations, abbreviations, numbers
and dates, foreign words, lists, tables,
bibliographies and indexing.
Being a handbook, guidelines are stated for doing
all these things, both in British and American
English.
Incidentally, this particular work can also be
purchased as part of a set of three matching
reference books, the other two being "The New Oxford
Spelling Dictionary", which lists words and their
syllables and shows how they should be split at the
end of a line, and "The New Oxford Dictionary for
Writers and Editors", which provides short
definitions of words, alternative spellings and
background information about the terms, some of which
are names (of famous people, towns, regions or
organisations, for example).
This type of reference work is essential for
academic writers, journalists, bloggers and, indeed,
anyone who constantly works with written language,
including translators.
Thursday, 14 Oct 2010
Key Words in Business (COBUILD)
by Bill Mascull
Although a bit dated now, this book is another
one I'm still glad to have on my office bookshelf.
It's actually intended to teach learners of English
business vocabulary, but I've found it a great way of
supplementing my own business knowledge, too, because
it's entertaining and informative at the same
time.
The author, Bill Mascull, has gone about the job
of presenting business words by dividing them into
six sections - What business are you in? / People and
organizations / Research, development, and production
/ Products, markets, and marketing / The bottom line
(i.e. money) / Towards the feelgood factor.
Words that are related are displayed in boxes and
then mentioned in a commentary and explained in each
section. Equally importantly, they're also shown in
context so you can see how they're employed in
practice. Learners of English can even do some
exercises to practise using the terms properly.
The terms Mascull has selected were taken from
the COBUILD Bank of English, which is a huge computer
database that "monitors and records the way in which
the English language is actually used in the modern
world" (so the back cover states). The sources that
have been tapped include The Economist, the Wall
Street Journal, the Financial Times and various
national newspapers with a large circulation. So if
you're interested in business language, you're on to
a good thing here.
Aspects of language
Metaphors We Live By
by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
Have you ever thought about how language is
constructed besides being based on grammatical rules
and lexical expressions? If you have any experience
of language teaching, then you'll already know about
the social functions that language can have (speech
acts, gambits, etc.). Well, this easy-to-read work is
actually about how we think in terms of metaphors in
order to express basic ideas.
In this case we're talking about English, but
much of what is said by the two US authors (Lakoff
and Johnson) also applies to the various other
languages I know and probably many others, too. (The
use of metaphors to express normal ideas may even be
universal.)
Take arguments, for example - the metaphor we
often use here is ARGUMENTS ARE LIKE WAR: you will
probably want to WIN an argument, but you may LOSE
one now and again; you might try and KNOCK someone's
argument DOWN or even BLAST it TO PIECES! Many other
metaphors are outlined in the book that are used in
everyday communication, like TIME IS A RESOURCE ("I
haven't got much time left" or "Time's running out"),
HAPPINESS IS UP ("He's up on Cloud 9"), SADNESS IS
DOWN ("to be down in the dumps") and LIFE IS A
JOURNEY (with stages and milestones, for
example).
Lakoff and Johnson gradually uncover the
metaphorical thinking behind our behaviour as the
book progresses and show how the metaphors are
systematically structured and can even be
inter-related. It's intriguing and quite an
eye-opener! Translators (like me) will also enjoy the
read because they can compare the languages they
speak to English and discover the metaphors at work
there, too.
Rediscover Grammar
by David Crystal
An authority on English linguistics, Prof David
Crystal has written a number of non-academic books on
the English language as well as academic works. This
one takes a modern look at English grammar,
explaining what the elements of it are as we
understand it today and illustrating this with
examples and notes on current usage. Although it's
written in a clear style, the amusing cartoons it
contains help to lighten the subject matter and make
it more enjoyable reading. The book is lightweight
reading and yet instructive, which is why I'd like to
recommend it here.
Tuesday, 26 Oct 2010
Through the Language Glass: Why the world looks
different in other languages
by Guy Deutscher
I started this book on language and thought the
other day and must say it's an enjoyable read - it's
well written and obviously well researched. One of
the themes it deals with is an old philosophical one
- does the language we speak influence the way we
think or does the way we think shape the way we say
things? (Does "the Whorf hypothesis" ring a bell
here?)
The second issue addressed is the effect that our
own culture has on our thinking, perception and
consequently on the way we express ourselves. The
author, himself multilingual and an academic
specialist in linguistics, takes a refreshing,
unconventional look at these matters and, indeed, the
achievements of psycholinguistics.
One of the first aspects of language he discusses
is how we describe and perceive colours in different
languages and cultures, and how this appears to have
changed in the course of time.
Guy Deutscher's approaches to the topics he
discusses here are historical and ethnographic: he
outlines which linguists came up with which theories
about the natural acquisition of colour terms, for
example (such as Berlin and Kay), shows how they
influenced linguistics at the time and then states
various examples of languages in which different
sequences of colour acquisition and different ways of
dividing up the colour spectrum into discreet units
like "blue" or "brown" exist. It's not nature alone
that determines which concepts are learnt in which
order, he says, but one's culture as well.
Besides looking at colour systems, the author
also addresses the issues of grammatical universals
and grammatical complexity and "simplicity", again
shaking the foundations of various outspoken claims
and theories made by linguists in the past.
It's actually quite difficult to summarise this
book as it covers various important areas of
psycholinguistics to show us how thinking has
developed and then dismantles some of the work done
by prominent researchers, clearly implying they were
barking up the wrong tree. (In fact, he even calls
his last chapter "Forgive us our ignorances".)
In Deutscher's own words, Through the Language
Glass sets out to show "that fundamental aspects
of our thought are influenced by the cultural
conventions of our society, to a much greater extent
than is fashionable to admit today" and that "the way
our language carves up the world into concepts has
not just been determined for us by nature".
I'm sure you'll enjoy this stimulating read, if
only because of its style of writing, which is rare
in linguistics.
Wednesday, 2 May 2012
Translation studies
A Textbook of Translation
by Peter Newmark
As the title implies, this is an academic book
primarily intended for undergraduates reading
Translation Studies. Peter Newmark has written a
great deal in this area and his Textbook has been
published several times, which goes to show its
standing in academia.
It's reasonably accessible as Newmark illustrates
his theoretical account with plenty of examples. Many
of these are taken from French and German literature,
however, which he personally seems to be very
familiar with, but which is not the sort of text most
translators have to deal with in their daily work.
The section on practical translation techniques is
potentially useful, but also focuses on ways of
translating linguistic units that exist in French
into English. By generalising, you can apply many of
these approaches to other similar Romance languages,
of course, but not necessarily to languages from
other families, particularly unrelated ones like
Arabic, Turkish, Finnish, Hungarian or Chinese.
Still, the book gets more interesting as you go
on - there are sections on different styles of
translation, such as literal ("straight")
translation, which Newmark feels gets a rough deal,
and technical translation, as well as on how to
handle lexical issues like abbreviations, acronyms,
collocations and other cultural issues like
metaphors, neologisms and units of measurement
(e.g.°F v °C, or metres v feet). The author
even touches on the treatment of differences in
punctuation in the source and target languages, which
is a neglected but nonetheless important aspect of
translating texts written in one language into
another as punctuation systems often differ.
On the whole, Newmark has attempted to cover a
wide range of issues in this textbook. I think it
would be of interest to students of translation,
particularly as he tries to show how theoretical
linguistics is of relevance to practical translation
work, and he also provides suggestions about
translation strategies that can be employed when
tackling source texts.
However, Newmark's repeated focus on literary
translation - in many examples that illustrate points
he's made and in a separate chapter on this type of
translation as well - are rather misplaced in my
opinion as very few new translators will work in that
field and be able to earn a living from it. The
chapter on technical translation is also so short
that I question its value; you could easily write a
whole book on this topic (which I'd also like to
read!).
Thursday, 29 July 2010
Verstehen und Übersetzen
by Paul Kußmaul
This work is a textbook for students of translation studies. It stands out from the crowd because of the way it's written: it's clear and practical, and doesn't get overly abstract when it addresses theoretical aspects of cognition and semantics. The author taught translators at the University of Mainz in Germersheim, Germany, for many years and often draws on what he experienced in his classes, introducing questions the students had and explaining how they tackled linguistic problems encountered during translation exercises.
The book is divided into eight chapters and spans 230 pages in its third, revised edition (from 2015). The first edition of it appeared in 2007, so it seems to be popular (and justifiably so in my opinion). Each chapter is followed by a short section with exercises to practise what has just been covered in the book, and some suggested answers can be found at the back, which is handy.
I like the variety of topics in this book. Initially, the author discusses lexical "false friends", ambiguity and knowing which word or meaning to pick in a dictionary (is a brush a "Pinsel" or a "Bürste" in German?). He looks at semantic prototypes and "framing" (1.5) in connection with mental images of words and situations to be translated and then covers words that are "hard to translate" (1.7).
Some of the examples he picks are taken from questionnaires in English that were translated for mass surveys in various European countries (ISSP surveys). These often contain references to culture-specific terms, such as National Insurance Contributions, but even words like "local" or "government" (p. 88) can turn out to be tricky to translate and call for careful reflection (pp. 37, 38). One of the key points Kußmaul makes is that words don't live in isolation, but in a specific cultural setting (2.1), which a translator also needs to bear in mind.
Here are a few more points he covers: how close should a translation be? (chap. 3), the need to differentiate (3.3), how to go about researching a term or subject (4.1), linguistic v encyclopaedic knowledge, expanding your vocabulary by learning new meanings of existing words, going beyond dictionaries when their entries fail to help (4.2), referring to online resources (IATE, Wikipedia, Google, etc.) and analysing texts properly to deduce the right meaning of a word in its context (dictionaries don't always offer the right answer!).
In the second half of the textbook, the author looks at cognitive translation processes (chap. 5), creativity in translation (6), visualising and scenes (7), and problem-solving as a translator, along with various practical strategies and techniques (8) translators can use.
In a nutshell, then, "Verstehen und Übersetzen" is a useful, hands-on textbook that is well worth reading. And astonishingly for a German textbook, it's actually easy to follow.
Thursday, 3 February 2022
>> Link to the e-book at the publisher's (Narr Verlag).
CAT tools
memoQ 6 in Quick Steps
by Kevin Lossner, 2012
I recently read Kevin Lossner's e-book on memoQ 6
shortly after it was first published. It was
well-written, interesting and helpful. The way of
presenting the material is a good one – using
short-but-clear explanations with lots of screen
shots to make the outlines and instructions easy to
follow.
The current version of the book is approx. 200
pages long and covers a wide variety of situations
that memoQ users are likely to encounter in their
daily translation work using the current version of
the CAT tool (v6).
Initially, Kevin describes how to install memoQ
correctly and set up memoQ projects that include TMs,
term bases and other useful language resources such
as LiveDocs corpora (= reference material). Setting
up a spelling checker and rules for segmentation,
auto-translation and auto-correction are also
discussed. Covering these basic points was a wise
idea because they affect how smoothly and accurately
you can translate once you get started.
Kevin then moves on to the essential topic of
preparing source files for translation and
pre-translating them automatically in memoQ. Good
file preparation can reduce the number of tags that
appear in a file after importing it into memoQ, but
it can also protect sensitive formatting information
by turning it into non-deletable tags (using the
Regex Tagger) as long as the file is in memoQ.
The next section discusses how to import and
translate specific file formats: PDF, HTML, XML,
bilinguals DOCs/RTFs, TTX, (SDL)XLIFF and other
CAT-tool formats, plus Microsoft Office files
containing embedded elements created using a
different Microsoft application (e.g. Excel charts
imported into Word).
Kevin also looks at internal quality-assurance
checks and various ways of exporting translations and
comments to file formats that external reviewers can
check, edit and return for easy re-importing into
memoQ (see the sections on collaboration and
delivery). After this, the translation can be
finalised and sent off to the customer.
Having finished an assignment, the translator may
want to edit or expand his/her term bases, tidy up
TMs or align source and target texts in LiveDocs.
These areas are covered in respective sections on
managing resources.
So as you can see, the author has tackled memoQ's
entire workflow from a practical viewpoint.
(Congratulations on doing it so clearly and
succinctly, Kevin.) This is a sound compendium of
practical information that ought to be of value to
any memoQ user.
Monday, 28 January 2013
Links to other information
As well as reviewing reference works on the
English language, we've also described more than 25
useful online dictionaries, encyclopedias and EU
resources that are likely to interest you:
» bilingual dictionaries and dictionaries
and spelling guides in various other
languages.
» various
glossaries of English and German terms.
» links for patent
translators, including online medical
resources
» quick overviews of popular CAT tools we're
familiar with.
Amper Translation Service, ATS,
Fürstenfeldbruck, FFB, translation, translator,
editing, proofreading, proof-reading, translation
agency, translation services, language services, Carl
Carter, editor, English, German, dictionaries,
reference works, glossaries, proofreader, book
reviews, summaries, Buchrezensionen, memoQ, CAT
tools
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